I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be China - you can still buy huge barrels of CCl4 from there, at the usual extremely cheap prices.
First world consumers have to demand ethically produced, environmentally friendly goods in order to fix these problems, instead of saying "We want it as cheap as possible but the result of that isn't our problem."
What the first world consumers need is to bring manufacturing back to the first world, so they can get jobs that pay enough to buy the products they help manufacture.
That, or basic income, if first world labor is no longer needed because manufacturing has become too efficient.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?graph_id=177007...
The US is making more stuff than ever before, but it's taking less people to do it.
Also America doesn't need to trade with China, but it does anyway.
America certainly needs to trade with China these days. Our economy cannot support costlier manufacturing these days
If we didnt have trade relations with China we'd automate the terrible jobs that we get chinese citizens to do for low wages. I believe the only reason we export work is because once you include capital cost (upfront investments) its cheaper/easier to have a human do it.
Of course, there'd be some ramp up time required where our stuff would be really expensive. Its going to happen anyways as Chinese citizens become more and more affluent and demand the middle class life of the rich world.
> the reality of the situation is that people are presently working too much
You don't fix this by giving people basic income. You fix this by making things cheaper so people don't have to work so much to make a living. Many necessities in our society have prices artificially inflated by various government policies (for example, farm subsidies artificially inflate the price of food). Adding another government policy (basic income) won't fix that.
This efficiency has also now moved to other industries, like manufacturing, because communication has become so easy.
I recall many people here saying that the record industries need to deal with it or die. Now that this same thing has started to effect your bottom line (or the bottom line of people you might care about), we need government sanctions to make up for the lost revenue.
Instead, I say we just deal with what has happened, like any other business model destroyed by technology (horse and buggy?!). Manufacturing jobs are gone. It's time to learn a new skill and figure out what will make you a living.
A basic income is not sustainable. It will only force legitimate businesses out of the US (which means less jobs) because of the higher taxes. These taxes will also only increase over time, because more and more people will start relying on it as a way to live.
At the time R-12 was the big money, R22 was cheap as dirt but starting to phase out. The company fell apart/was bought out, but not before the firing (and arrest?) of one VP, multiple allegations of trade violations, and the seizing of a substantial amount of refrigerant.
Our distribution center was packed up and shipped back to TX, and I never really followed along with what ended up happening. This was about 15 years ago, my memory is a little fuzzy.
BUT, a few things have stuck with me...
We used to get containers of 30lb cylinders of banned refrigerants (mostly R12, but also R22 and less common CFCs) from China. The BOL and packages themselves stated it was reclaimed refrigerant, which was legal to buy/sell. No idea of it was legal to import/export, but purchasing was done at corporate headquarters and not something I was ever involved with.
Anyway, part of my job was overseeing the testing/categorization of reclaimed CFCs. We had a pretty decent little lab we'd use to determine which CFCs were reclaimed, purity, oil content, water content... etc.
Part of our company's pitch was that we could make reclaimed refrigerants identical to newly synthesized product ('revirginate') using some advanced distillation and filtration processes. While possible, at the time there was nobody doing true 100% purification of reclaimed products at scale. It was simply too expensive. ALL of the 'revirginated' CFCs had detectable levels of impurities, and we'd frequently do tests with our fancy gas chromatography system for QC. It was close enough that functionality was fine and it was cheaper than virgin gas, so buyers didn't care.
But the reclaimed gas that came from China -- guess what impurities/contaminants we found in the Chinese cylinders? Yup... nothing. Remember, this is late 90s/early 00s, and our company was (supposedly) an industry leader using some pretty sophisticated purification techniques. I never bought into the idea that the Chinese product was reclaimed.
I could be wrong, perhaps they had better technology, but the reclamation dates were VERY clearly after production was supposed to have ended and I find it hard to imagine they were returning product that was indiscernible from virgin product.
I'd be surprised if some enterprising companies in China aren't still making huge amounts of the stuff. It can't all be coming from old systems (it's worth so much money reclaimed) and asthma inhalers.
I could add more, the Bhopal plant was supposed to be a replica of UCC's MIC plant in West Virginia and UCC was in charge of design and construction. Strangely enough they thought the plant in India could do without most of the safety systems in place in the Virginia plant. Further, discovery process of litigation has brought forth gobs of documentation that shows that cost cutting measures were enforced by the US side of the corporation. Yes the ownership was indeed shared, but as is often the case control and power leaned overwhelmingly on the UCC side. Scientists employed by UCC wrote to Indian counterparts to help deal medically with the tragedy, in particular they mentioned people should be injected with thiocynate salts to chelate out the active poison. This in itself would have saved thousands of lives. However, since the success of this intervention would have proved that the leaked MIC is more than "just tear gas, just wash your face" they not only took a heavy handed approach to totally discredit the advice with FUD but instructed the Indian government to demolish stores of thiocynate that were being used by local clinics, which they did. They were aware of the long term affects of the leaked gas, but concealed all information about it, and knowledge of how the medical effects could be mitigated. They spread rumors about disgruntled employee precipitating the disaster on purpose, but to this day it remains just an allegation, no corroborating evidence of that has been found or substantiated. DOW, as well as the US government officials have several times pressured the Indian government to drop the charges in lieu of setting up a foundation provided that they are absolved of all liability.
If you care to know more there are enough resources on the internet and just a few google searches away, or else you can take a 'post a driving ticket' smear approach to it.
The Indian govt had little to no real operational control over the plant but they are very far from fee of blame. They worked actively to shield UCC so as to make Indian economy look attractive to foreign investors. Warren Anderson was personally given a safe passage out rather then being detained/arrested. They suppressed, and continue to do so govt funded research on the health effects of the MIC gas conducted by its national medical lab ICMAR, purportedly because the findings are so damaging. They have taken no steps to corral the premises of the plant where children go to play habitually. However the moment there is a spike of interest in the national news the premises are heavily guarded to deny journalists and environmentalists access to the conditions.
This is a huge problem, we are so quick to tell others that they can not walk the same road to riches that we did (by polluting the environment with abandon).
But that's creating an artificial moat which will simply lengthen the period that non-affluent countries will remain that way. This serves us in all kinds of ways and is actually quite unfair.
I don't have a way out of this but I feel there is something quite wrong with telling a country that has some natural resource that they can't deplete it (after depleting our own natural resources) and telling a country that is polluting like mad that they shouldn't do that either (after we did that ourselves and have reaped the benefits of it).
Tough problems.
Firstly, the world didn't forge ahead with the industrial revolution in spite of the environmental costs. No one was initially aware of those costs. Now we are, and there's a push for everyone to change their tactics. I think it's fair that everyone has to change, but I acknowledge that it's a bit unfair that the west got to profit on those mistakes. But that's just life.
Developing nations now have real solid data on the environmental damage an industrial revolution will inflict not only on their part of the world, but the world as a whole. Is it fair to ask them to factor that new knowledge into their plans? Maybe it's not exactly fair, but it's a reasonable request I think.
But then what about a child born today? Is it fair for that child to grow up in a world where the air they will breath becomes more dangerous with each passing second, even though the adults of today know what they are doing and have it in their power to not do it? I think that's unfair.
And it's not like China's industrialisation has helped all Chinese. It's helped a few people. Is it fair that all citizens of Shanghai should suffer the health effects of the pollution generated as a result of 1 persons endeavour to maximise a profit? I don't see it.
This is not to say it's a black and white issue. Someone somewhere has to get a rough deal. This sadly is the world we've created for ourselves, and the rules we've decided to live by. It's not fair.
One is preserving the environment, often (global warming, ocean acidification, mercury pollution, acid rain, background radiation elevation, plastics pollution, ozone depletion, antibiotics overuse) in ways which affect the global environment and pose existential risks to all of modern civilization, if not humanity.
The other is equity and fairness.
Achieving a few years or decades of growth to lose it all really doesn't strike me as particularly rational behavior.
Addressing the whole scope of challenges facing the world is going to be exceptionally difficult.
We've developed technologies and equipment for extracting natural resources without the pollution we used to create; developing countries should skip ahead and make use of those same technologies. They're not exactly national secrets; I'd bet that our manufacturers who produce that equipment would be happy to fill overseas orders, and I doubt the US government would have a problem with it.
Ozone holes and CFC levels and ocean acidity and fish stocks and algal blooms and ground water levels and contamination and whatever else.
"We shouldn't tell them what to do" has a moral balance to it, but it doesn't create more unpolluted planet or undo the mess already made.
The bigger problem is that humans, as with all life, exists to exploit entropic gradients. Some of these are huge (e.g., the energy densities of hydrocarbons and fissible nuclear fuels), some are much more subtle, including the disruptions caused by introductions of modest amounts of novel contaminants into the environment. It's both our entropic sources and sinks which can be overwhelmed.
And economic growth which comes at a cost of the future to all isn't growth. It's a Ponzi scheme.
A lot of my goods come from basically slave labor and polluters. They have a competitive advantage over companies who don't, so garbage floats and takes over. Countries are complicit when they support or benefit from other countries which do this.
This is exactly the sort of thing where we're all in it, hands dirtied, want it or not.